Sunday, April 19, 2015

Volunteers

Petrified Forest National Park, and many other park areas
around the country, relies heavily on the good services provided by
volunteers.In our fiscal year 2014,
volunteers contributed over 15,000 hours of work to Petrified Forest, the equivalent
of more than 7 full time employees and, at Arizona rates, worth over $300,000.That work consisted of greeting visitors at
the visitor centers, walking with them on trails and answering questions,
watering landscape plants, conducting scientific field work in paleontology,
archeology, and biology, doing trail construction projects, and removing
internal ranch fences no longer needed after the park’s purchase of the Hatch
(Paulsell) and McCauley Ranches in 2011 and 2013, respectively.Last Labor Day weekend, over 50 volunteers
provided both leadership and legwork to the mini bio-blitz conducted on the
newly acquired lands and recorded nearly 250 species of plants and animals in a
24 hour period.The accomplishments of
volunteers are crucial additions to what the staff does and in some cases, the
work done by volunteers would not be done at all without them.﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Short Horned Lizard discovered on Bio-Blitz (NPS)

Our volunteers come from all over the country.Often, they bring their own housing with them
and stay in our trailer pads for a month or a few months before they either
head back home or to their next volunteer or travel destination.We recruit volunteers through the website www.volunteer.gov .

Volunteer Trish Jackson (NPS)

This
weekend, 27 volunteers have signed up to help us remove more fence from the
Paulsell Ranch.We are prioritizing the
mesh fence as opposed to the barbed wire fence because the mesh is more
difficult if not impossible for pronghorn and other wildlife to cross.Since the fence is no longer needed to manage
livestock, it is an impediment to wildlife movement and important for us to
remove.This will be the third volunteer
day focused on fence removal – to date, approximately 2 miles of mesh fence and
2.8 miles of barbed wire fence have been removed by volunteers.This weekend’s crew will be larger than other
days and we hope to remove another 6 miles of mesh fence.Considering the added workload of maintaining
roads and exterior fencing we need to keep when we acquired these ranches,
removal of internal fencing would not happen at all if not for these volunteer
efforts.

Volunteers working on the fenceline (NPS)

We are grateful to all the volunteers who give their time,
expertise, and effort to make Petrified Forest National Park a better place in
so many different ways.